


Banzo (dead sea)

by HipericoLotus



Series: Imputing Missingness [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Ireland isn't usually this depressing, Non-Linear Narrative, Past Abuse, Pre-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Religion, Stream of Consciousness, Suicidal Thoughts, galway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 07:59:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14232813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HipericoLotus/pseuds/HipericoLotus
Summary: [For David]Depending on where you're at, this could be cathartic or send you off the edge. Please please don't read if you're in a bad place. Your life will always be worth more than your death."The water is gentle, waves lapping instead of breaking. There is no one to intervene."





	Banzo (dead sea)

For David

 

Ireland this time. You should be used to dead ends by now, but this is your first without Sam. 

You mean to start following up on leads even less promising than this one, but you’re reaching a limit that you shy away from with something like dull terror. Train tracks catch your eye and you follow them to a station, find yourself buying a Butler’s hot chocolate and a ticket to Galway, booking a room in the town’s biggest hostel on your phone. It’s freezing cold, snow falling outside, but when the train arrives you sit on the worn purple seat furthest from the doors, enjoying the pleasant voice speaking Irish over the loudspeakers, and try to lose yourself in the scenery on the other side of the windowpane. 

The hostel is crowded when you arrive. It’ll be easy to blend in. Slipping the keycard into your pocket, you head back to Eyre Square, angling towards the pedestrian-only streets. You’re not sure what you’re looking for, but it’s not the warmth of the pubs or the laughter that drifts out of them. You’re wholly out of distractions, or maybe of the energy it takes to distract yourself. 

You end up on a bridge, water rushing under you; the open sea meets the river you're crossing. You’re hit by an indescribable something, its pace odd, like the commuter train as it left the station: slim and white and comfortably scuzzy, deceptively slow until suddenly it’s speeding fast enough to crush an eighteen-wheeler. Yemayá is as present here as she was on the beach in Rio the night before you and mami boarded the ship North, but she appears through a mirror darkly, incarnate in the snow that piles up on the beach, the shells and pebbles that lacerate your numb feet when you strip off your boots, desperate to be grounded by the sand. 

The water is gentle, waves lapping instead of breaking, and it’s been a half hour since the last dog-walking adventurer nodded hello and hurried back to the warm light spilling out of the houses on the other side of the sports fields. Even the gulls are gone. The commuter train becomes a freight train. There is no one to intervene but Yemayá and she isn’t here, not really, and the Triple Goddess might prefer gentle sacrifice to candlelit rose-heaped offerings, might want a virgin white as snow and tainted as Miriam’s curse, golden good-haired dead-faced apple pie man born under the nappy halo of the criolla history forgot. 

Then the doctor is there. Kind eyes, a brilliant mind, so good, so good, seeing in you what no one else does, telling you you’re strong, you’re worthy, you deserve to be eugenicized, while mami cries in heaven. Gentle hands tracing your bare aspen skin, do this when you can’t get used to your new body, get in touch with it, pleasure yourself, it’ll do for your soul what the serum does for its temple. 

Dead eyes, cooling flesh, the stench of fresh blood yielding to something else. They let you sit with the body, alone, and your strange new limbs and thick torso could engulf it, so you stretch out next to the meatsuit and cry into its shoulder. You’re not leper-white anymore, and your eyes are jewel-bright instead of blank holes, and the tears taste cleaner than they ever have; you’re healthy, healthy, healthy and the doctor’s breath smells like the severed leg with painted toenails the neighborhood kids found in a Brooklyn gutter. While you were dead a poet wrote of the Rose of Hiroshima and you think now, up to your waist in icy womb-water, that this was what the doctor’s breath smelled like, wafting from the warm roses of atomic wounds and roses should be offerings, should wash up on the beach at dawn on the first day of the year; a rotting rose should smell like the compost heap under the rosas chinas where zapallitos spring up under the browning fallen petals, but the roses on the doctor’s breath weren’t pampa dust returning to pampa dust or parrilla ashes returning to parrilla ashes, they were Chernobyl and Nagasaki and the shadow of a vaporized ojii-san immortalized on the asfalto like the pumice lovers of Pompeii. 

The Triple Goddess calls, and Yemayá grieves and beckons, and you don’t deserve to identify with it but you wonder anyway if this is what the Middle Passage was like. 

When survival was death, not chains.

**Author's Note:**

> Depending on where you're at, this could be cathartic or send you off the edge. Please please don't read if you're in a bad place. 
> 
> Banzo: Psychopathological state, a type of profoundly depressed nostalgia, almost always fatal, into which some African slaves fell in the Americas. The term may have originated in the quicongo term mbanzu - “thought”, “remembering” - or in the quimbundo term mbonzo - “saudade”, “passion”, “hurt”.’ (definition by Nei Lopes) 
> 
> Dead Sea is a reference to Mar Morto, a book by Jorge Amado
> 
> The Rose of Hiroshima adapted musically by Secos e Molhados with English subtitles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k07PHHUnEeM
> 
> Part of what pushed me to set this in Ireland with Afro-Brazilian themes/cosmology was the juxtaposition of two songs, the Cranberries' "Zombie" and Jorge Ben Jor's "Zumbi" (available with English subtitles at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zMI4LyXkpw)
> 
> Super autobiographical so please be gentle with comments. That said, if there's anything insensitive or hurtful I apologize; please let me know.


End file.
